Today I will be reviewing RAGE, developed ID Software by and published by Bethesda Softworks, Square Enix & Aspyr Media.
Storyline:
Generally I love post-apocalyptic games, they usually look cool and it’s fun to find out what happened and discover all of the lore of the world and get to know the state humanity is in now etc. This game has none of that. At all. You are asleep in stasis for hundreds of years, wake up and are thrown into the thick of things with no explanation whatsoever, no recap on what’s happened to the earth or the human race while you have been under, beyond a few vague references to the games main bad guys, who are creatively referred to as the “Authority” (that’s right up there with naming an unobtainable metal “Unobtanium” by the way).
Score: 1/10
Graphics:
The graphics in this game are very poor in a lot of the areas, especially inside. There are whole areas with little variation in colour or texture, which makes everything look dull and flat (like a man’s leather strap over his top looking like it’s fused with his top, or a woman’s necklace looking like it’s fused with her skin). Having said that, a lot of the outside environments do look very nice, I just wish they had put that kind of effort into the whole game. There are parts of enemy bases that look dark because entire sections are just blocky low quality textures covering an area, there are signs that are unreadable because the writing is so badly pixelated, and it’s almost impossible to tell usable items from the scenery a lot of the time.
Score: 4/10
Combat:
The weapons in this game are very unbalanced, you have weapons which do very little damage (even at point blank range, like the shotgun) or weapons that are way too over powered (like wingsticks, which are essentially futuristic boomerangs, and they can one-shot almost anything in the game). In fact, wingsticks are so overpowered in this game that you rarely need to use other weapons, unless you’re being swarmed.
Score: 5/10
AI:
The enemies in this game are stupid, suicidally stupid. Most of the time they will do little more than run at you screaming and waving their weapons in a usually vain attempt to hit you, or they stay at range and rarely try to take cover between shots. Honestly, you’d be in more danger fighting a group of Lemmings. And the bosses? Yeah, don’t expect much more beyond “They are bigger and hit harder” because that is pretty much all you’re gonna get here. Then there’s the fact that most of the time you’re fighting people who are just trying to survive the same as you, yet you’re supposed to be the good guy.
Score: 3/10
Voice Acting & Dialogue:
I don’t even know where to begin on how much I hate the dialogue and voice acting in this game, suffice it to say that the characters would have seemed more in depth had this entire game been text-based. The lines are all delivered with zero emotion, and it sounds like the voice actors were simply reading aloud from the page, rather than acting out dialogue between characters stuck in a hellish war-torn post-apocalyptic world ruled by a tyrannical organisation that is oppressing and terrorising the rest of humanity.
Score: 4/10
Read more: RAGE – Review